In the Midst of the Sea

by Sean McCarthy

  “Don’t worry,” the man said. He had said his name was Jim. “They’ll be fine out there. No one is going to bother them here.”

  “It’s not them I’m worried about,” said Brian. “It’s whoever they come in contact with—little terrors.”

  Jim laughed. “Well, don’t worry about that either. The homes up here are all winterized, but the majority of the residents are summer ones. A few weekends in the spring, a few weekends in the fall. And rentals of course. You can make a lot of money if you buy and decide to rent the place out during the summer.”

  The silence inside was loud and untouched. A dining room just off the foyer. Jim flicked on the light. A chandelier. The tables and chairs covered with dust. The chairs pulled back just a bit, an antique china doll sitting in each one as if awaiting a tea party. Jim stepped aside, allowing them to look at the room. He blushed when he saw the dolls.

  “The people who lived here before had a little girl. Carol said she’s been meaning to get in here, clean the place up a bit, but it’s one thing after another, you know. She still has three kids at home, two of them teens—people say it’s even more work once they become teens.”

  “Fireplace work?” Brian asked.

  “It should.” Jim stepped over and peered underneath. “Probably needs to be cleaned though.”

  Jim shut off the dining room light, and after moving through the bedrooms upstairs—nice size bedrooms for a house this old, the master bedroom even had a balcony, a pulpit, he said they called it—they started back downstairs, into the living room, moving toward the kitchen.

  “Built in 1871,” Jim said, “but as you can see, they’ve kept up with it. Kept it as original as possible whenever it’s been renovated. Solid though, it’s really a solid house. At one time it was the only one up this way.”

  “How long has it been empty?” Lori asked

  “Just about five years, believe it or not,” Jim said, “1995, I think. There were some legal holdups. The owner’s wife had left him, apparently—they hadn’t been here too long—and no one was able to track her down for a while after he died, no one had any idea where she went, so then the case had to go to probate.”

  Leaving. Left. Brian tensed up a little bit, looked away—out the back window at the enormous tree stump the boys had climbed upon—so his eyes wouldn’t betray anything. The whole reason they were down here, moving, was because Lori had threatened to leave him. Kim Barnes, twenty-two years old, a substitute teacher doing an internship while in her senior year at Bridgewater State. Blonde and curved with full pouting lips. She started coming to his classroom—American History—every day after school, and before he knew it they were in the supply closet. Kim on her knees, leopard skin panties, or up against the wall, one leg wrapped around his hip as she dug her nails into his shoulders. And then it had moved from there to his house—couldn’t go to hers, she still lived with her parents—and from there it was just a matter of time. Lori, after kicking him out for a week, had given him the ultimatum—either they leave together, or she and the boys were leaving without him. The town was too small, and the whore—as she called her—too close, the scandal too much. The school hadn’t argued with his resignation, and the high school down here had offered him a job. Remote and safe, out in the sea.

  Max jumped back upon the stump and pushed Harry off. Lori was moving about the kitchen, checking the stove, the faucets. The light switches. Jim looked at Brian staring out the window.

  “The cemetery is nice for taking a morning stroll. A few historic graves out there. Whaling captains and such. The island is just full of history. Anyway,” he continued, “the legal thing wasn’t a huge issue because the house wasn’t in both their names, just his, and he didn’t will it to her, but you know, she was next of kin, so they had to give it the old college try. Then it just ended up going to his sister, and she and her husband both have good jobs up on the North Shore, so she just decided to sell it.”

  “And did they ever find the wife?” Brian asked.

  Jim hesitated. “I believe so … after everything was said and done. I heard something to that effect anyway. Out in California or something. San Francisco. I guess she wasn’t interested in contesting it at all though. The marriage obviously wasn’t a good one, so I don’t know, maybe she just wanted to leave it all behind her.”

  Lori was now checking the cabinets. The dishes all remained. Dusty. “What happened to him?” she asked.

  “Him?” Jim asked.

  She turned on her heels. “Yeah, him. The owner of the house.”

  Jim made a clucking sound with his tongue, then cleared his throat. “Well, he, uh, killed himself.”

  “Killed himself?” Lori asked.

  “Yes,” said Jim, “I guess it’s better that you know about it upfront. Downstairs in the cellar. Sad thing. He had inherited the house from an elderly relative or something like that, and was pretty excited about moving here—I mean, obviously, it’s a beautiful house. I guess his wife leaving him was too much for the poor guy.”

  “In the cellar?” Lori asked.

  Jim nodded a little, looking uncomfortable again. “Yeah, early spring. I think he was down there a few days before anyone found him. Worked at the post office, but drank a little too much, so at first no one jumped on it. But then after he didn’t show up for three or four days, well, you know. I guess they just sent somebody out here.”

  A few days, Brian thought. The kids wouldn’t need to know about that.

  Lori looked at him. Wanting him to read her eyes. Did this mean the house was out, or did this mean they had a bargaining chip? He wasn’t sure. He shrugged a little.

  “And what happens, if say, we bought the house, and the wife comes back?” Lori asked. “I mean, you know, declares the property should have been hers.”

  “Well, she can’t,” Jim said. “It’s already been cleared through the courts, the deed belongs to his sister. I’m not even sure where she is.”

  “And you don’t think she’ll come back.”

  Jim hesitated. “No, I don’t think she’ll come back. It’s all been taken care of. Through the courts.”

  Lori asked Jim if he could excuse them for a moment, and the man stepped back into the dining room, looking at the old photo on the wall. A sepia tinged wedding photo, looking to have been taken sometime much earlier in the century. Or probably even well before that. The nineteen hundreds. An old wedding photo. The man with slicked hair and muttonchops. The woman, young, beautiful, frightened.

  Lori and Brian stepped out onto the porch. The boys were still chasing each other, now scrambling over the pipe-rail fence that separated the yard from the cemetery. You couldn’t hear the waves—they were a little too far inland—but you could smell the sea. Brian bet that there were few, if any, places on the island where you couldn’t smell the sea. It was all around you, something he loved about it already.

  Lori huddled her arms about her.

  “No wonder the price is so low,” he said. “A little creepy, huh? Living next to a cemetery, and the guy killed himself inside.”

  Lori sighed. “Yeah, it is, but I think with any old house, you’re going to have things like that. Maybe not suicide, but almost all of them are going to have histories, people dying inside, I mean. I love old houses.” She looked through the doorway; Jim was still in the living room. “Who knows? Maybe it can help us knock the price down even further.”

  His antennae went up. “So you like it?”

  “I love it,” she whispered. “It is pretty much exactly how I would build it, modernizing it of course, I mean. And painting it. Are you kidding me? Out here?” She punched him lightly, affectionately, in the shoulder. “We can get them to drop the price twenty or thirty thousand, it will be a steal. It already is.”

  The boys darted about the headstones. There for a minute, then gone, just their voices, rising, passing on the breeze. Lori tilted her head up and he kissed her before pulling her close.

  “It is chilly
,” she said.

  “Yeah, but that will just be for another month or so,” he said. “Just imagine the summers. The summers will be beautiful.” And they would be. Beach during the day, blue skies and sun, and quiet evenings on the porch, the dusk quietly settling. And peace and solitude during the winter. Wonderful solitude. The island was beautiful. It would be good for them. It would be a good house.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SEAN PADRAIC MCCARTHY’s short stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, The Hopkins Review, Prole, Supernatural Tales, The Indianola Review, South Dakota Review, The Sewanee Review, 2 Bridges Review, Water~Stone Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Shadowgraph Magazine, Fifth Wednesday Journal, and South Dakota Review. McCarthy’s story “Better Man”—originally published in december magazine—was listed as a “Distinguished Story” in The Best American Short Stories 2015. He is a ten-time Top 25 Finalist in the Glimmer Train Fiction Open Award, and a 2016 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s Artist Fellowship in Fiction Award. He lives in Massachusetts.